Since the woods around here are getting thicker and there was some talk of the Thursday night practice sessions and parks, what kind of things are important for good courses and training if we're going to be doing Park O?

-- Eric S. (erics1999@msn.com), April 29, 2002

Answers

One thing that is important is to keep the courses in areas that are pleasant to run in shorts. The course setter ought to avoid forcing people to get their legs cut up or wade through poison ivy.

There are plenty of areas at Shawnee Mission Park that offer good park O' terrain. The mtb trails and the paved trail (Mill Creek?) are both good areas. The open fields on the east edge of the map are nice, too. City parks also offer decent terrain.

Maps -- well, PTOC has an old map of Loose Park. I don't think it has been used for a long time. It might be available for a training session. OK has a good map of Broken Arrow Park in Lawrence. I'm working on a map of Bonner Park (just west of the Kansas Speedway). It'd also be fine to use a sketch map or non-O' map. It can also be interesting to include some street O' on a regular street map.

Course setting -- Typical park O' courses are short with lots of controls. The courses often have lots of direction changes. Direction changes and short legs force the orienteers to read the map a lot. Part of the challenge of park O' is that the running is so fast that the map reading can be really difficult. (As a test, try running a yellow course at a local meet as fast as you can -- the navigation is easy, but you still have to pay attention). Of course, longish legs with some route choice can also be interesting. I can imagine a challenging route choice leg at SMP that would go from somewhere west of the dam to somewhere near the east park entrance, for example.

As with any course setting, variety and route choice problems make it most interesting.

Here is another type of course that might make for interesting summer O' training:

http://www.orienteeringonline.com/data/id_0280.html

-- Michael (meglin@juno.com), May 03, 2002.

The Park World Tour web page is a good place to look at a lot of courses. Go to the link for "seasons 1996-2001" and there are lots of courses to look at for inspiration:

http://www.pwt.org/

-- Michael (meglin@juno.com), May 03, 2002.